E23F MODULE FOUR: OBJECTIVE CRITICISM: TOPICS COVERED
- Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetic creation (the chemical analogy)
- Eliot’s concept of the ‘objective correlative’
- Ransom’s distinction between the ‘logical core’ and the ‘local
texture’ in poetry
- Brooks’s concept of the ‘heresy of paraphrase’
- Brooks’s view that poetic language is inherently ‘paradoxical’
- Brooks’s concept of irony as the ‘principle of structure’ of poetry
- Brooks’s concept of the ‘coherence’ of a poem
- Coleridge’s notion of the ‘organic unity’ of the work of art
- The ‘intentional’ and the ‘affective’ fallacies (Wimsatt and
Beardsley)
- The formalist rethinking of literary history: Eliot’s conception of the
literary ‘tradition’ and the individual’s relation to it
- Aristotle’s concept of ‘plot’
- Neo-Aristotelian narratology--the study of the structure of prose
narrative (Crane; Booth)
- The ahistoricism of both New Criticism and Neo-Aristotelian narratology
- Reasons why most / all Anti-colonial and feminist critics are
uncomfortable focusing exclusively on the form of a literary work